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Shakespeare’s plays were produced at a number of playhouses, including the Rose, the Theatre, the Curtain, the Globe, and the Blackfriars. Over the centuries, ongoing analysis of historical evidence has supported the idea that each of these theatres looked different and might have undergone changes during their operational periods. However, while a range of evidence and scholarship about the appearance of these playhouses exists, they provide a corpus of interpretative possibilities more so than a fixed picture of ‘Shakespearean theatre.’ Sifting through this evidence begs the question of how audiences may have internalized ‘fixed’ images of Shakespearean theatre in viewing modern reconstructions and early modern illustrations without considering evidentiary uncertainty. Even today, a large number of outstanding questions are being disputed when it comes to what various playhouses looked like. What were their shapes and sizes? How were they decorated inside and out? How did audiences enter the playhouses? What were the shapes and sizes of the stages? How many stages had pillars, what size were they and where were they located? This blog attempts to address some of these questions by dissecting the 1596 de Witt/van Buchell drawing of Swan Theatre.

This paper compares the all-or-nothing and proportionate damage rules for allocating damages in tort cases under evidentiary uncertainty. The focus is on how the two rules affect litigation expenditures by plaintiffs and defendants. The results of simulation experiments show that the expected judgment at trial is higher under the all-or-nothing rule for cases where the defendant did not take adequate care, but the judgment is higher under the proportionate rule when the defendant took more than adequate care. As for litigation expenditures, assuming equal costs of litigation, overall expenditures are higher under the all-or-nothing rule, except for very weak and very strong cases.

We show that negligence standards should differ under comparative and contributory negligence regimes. If due care standards are allowed to vary with the laws of a jurisdiction, then comparative and contributory negligence may be equally efficient, even in a model with evidentiary uncertainty. It is commonly observed that jurors are naturally inclined to be more lenient to plaintiffs on the issue of plaintiff negligence in contributory negligence jurisdictions. We show that such lenience may actually be efficient in addition to satisfying jurors' senses of equity. A similar conclusion applies to defendants. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)